Tiberius with a Telephone

by Patrick Mullins

  But perhaps more than ever before, the government of the Republic [of Vietnam] acknowledges that getting on top of the internal threat to security and the development of progressive government in the provinces are tasks best performed by themselves once a sufficient degree of security from massive external attack has been established.1

  Implicit in the announcement was some recognition that Australia needed to make its decisions independently, and not in reaction to American ones. There were signs that it was a good strategy to pursue further. When, nine days later, US president Richard Nixon announced another American troop withdrawal, McMahon came under little pressure to modify the government’s policy: he could point to the 30 March announcement as an indication that Australia was already moving to withdraw.2

  Nevertheless, McMahon knew that there had to be some kind of change. Late in April, he was canvassing ending conscription once troops were withdrawn from Vietnam; early in May, he told Bunting that he wanted ‘new thought to be given’ to the strategy of Australia’s commitment in Vietnam and conscription; by June, he was concerned that Australia’s policy of withdrawal was not in ‘drift’.3 Changes that he pushed for would, eventually, lead to Australia’s extrication from the conflict; but the successive Moratorium marches on 30 April, 30 May, and 30 June would ensure that they were considered under the pressure of substantial public protests.

  The past continued to haunt the government. In June, the New York Times began to publish leaked extracts of a US Department of Defense report on America’s political and military involvement in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers, as they came to be called, soon caught the attention of the Australian press, which focused on the origins of Australia’s involvement. Very quickly, opponents of the war pointed out that the public justification for joining the conflict — that Australia had done so at the request of the South Vietnamese government — was questionable, if not a lie. The furore prompted Menzies to make a rare public intervention and deny that he had misled Parliament when announcing Australia’s commitment; meanwhile, the government, under McMahon, was forced to publish the South Vietnamese government’s 1964 requests for military assistance.4 But the conclusion was clear: the Australian government had decided to commit its military in advance of a request that it had sought to bring about in response to pressure from the United States. Though McMahon had, at the vital meeting where that decision was made on 7 April 1964, expressed his doubts about it, he was now the one who took the brunt of criticism. He did not aid his cause by pointing out that he was the only person at that meeting who was still in government.5 It harmed the image that McMahon sought to create: of a calm, wise politician who was keeping up with the times.

  By the winter of 1971, McMahon was tense, tired, and moody. He was arguing with Anthony and Sinclair. He was suspicious of Gorton. He was critical of his ministers.6 He was frustrated with the amount of work he was doing, weighed down by the pressure on him. Could his department help? he asked John Bunting. ‘It was my belief that the first and principal step for him,’ Bunting wrote of this conversation, ‘was to put more responsibility on the relevant Ministers but I knew that in some cases this would cause him anxiety and that in a few matters the handling would not in reality greatly satisfy him. But this was the price he would have to pay for the shifting of the load from himself.’7 As Bunting had seen, the cause of McMahon’s angst was as much his own frustration with himself. Before leaving to take up his position in London, Tony Eggleton thought McMahon appeared ‘uncertain and disappointed in his own performance.’8

  Howson believed that McMahon needed ‘encouragement’, and thought he had a ‘tremendous load’.9 In May, McMahon was ‘extremely tired’ and in ‘need of a rest’, a point emphasised when he sat down for an interview with two journalists from Time magazine.10 Appearing distracted throughout, McMahon spent the interview leafing through a voluminous briefing file and reading verbatim answers to the questions, which had been submitted to him in advance. His reliance on the material was such that when he was unexpectedly asked about Australia’s future, he began to look concerned. There was no note about Australia’s future in the file. After humming and hawing, he told the journalists he had to catch a plane and would send them his thoughts later.11 ‘Is the situation that he needs briefing before he can deal with a subject?’ Alan Reid asked incredulously, when he heard. ‘No piece of paper, no answer?’12 Nor did McMahon ever provide that answer.

  McMahon was indecisive. His propensity for telephoning around — ‘I get too many calls,’ he complained to Bunting on 6 June13 — saw him constantly revising his opinions, shifting his stance depending on what each new caller said. He buried himself in detail, but rarely seemed able to settle on a course of action. Speaking later, Bunting observed that McMahon worked hard but was ‘somehow insecure’:

  There was a real enigma there … He had undeniable abilities, undeniable. He was very active, very hardworking. He started early and he finished late and worked, as far as I could observe, all the time in between … He was nervous to a degree about any decision, and he worked hard towards getting decisions, ceaselessly, relentlessly … McMahon — having decided that such and such was the right line — was likely not to have second thoughts, but, more public service style, to be seeing the other side of the case all the time and, in some ways, to be just that little bit edgy, insecure; and sometimes of course it led to changes in decisions.14

  In June, he was ‘vastly overworked’, in Howson’s opinion, and despairing of the qualities of his staff.15 When he gave a speech on tariff policy to a Chamber of Manufacturers dinner in late July, Frank Packer was blunt: ‘Bill, that was a bloody awful speech.’ The criticism — from perhaps the only person McMahon could not brush off — prompted him to begin talk of employing a full-time speechwriter who could work alongside Keith Sinclair.

  Was McMahon out of his depth? Was he failing? After a dinner with McMahon at the Lodge in July, Bert Kelly certainly thought so: ‘I must admit that I am becoming acutely despondent about the standard of leadership that we get nowadays. I never thought much of John Gorton as leader and I don’t think much of McMahon either. There is far too much of the politician in him and too little of the statesman.’16 McMahon would never admit that. He would only say that being prime minister exhausted him. There was so much work, so many responsibilities. It was a totally preoccupying position, he would say, with recurring deadlines, commitments, functions, and roles that left little time to rest or think. ‘The job is a man-killer.’17

  Gorton, in particular, vexed McMahon. Much as he might think wistfully of his deputy accepting a diplomatic appointment, there was little prospect of Gorton giving McMahon the clear air that McMahon, as his deputy, had never given him. At least there were regular breaks when Gorton went abroad, such as in April, when he attended the concluding talks on the Five Power Defence Arrangements in London.

  Ostensibly, the talks should have been uncontroversial, something McMahon could leave to Gorton to handle. Progress had been swift since Lord Carrington’s visit to Australia in July 1970. Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, and the UK had established an air-defence council; in February, Malcolm Fraser had announced that Australian, British, and New Zealand armed forces would be organised as a single force commanded by an Australian. The talks in London would see the final understanding hammered out. Assuming this occurred, the agreement would represent a substantial triumph for the government, one for which McMahon could claim credit.18

  But another problem was brewing, one that would exacerbate the tension between McMahon and Gorton. Earlier in the year, Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister of Singapore, had decided that the Australian and New Zealand governments should pay rent for the facilities their military forces used in Singapore, on the grounds that they were there for their own national interests. An ad hoc committee of cabinet considered the matter on 7 April. ‘[The] man is serious and would like to twist [our] arm,’ McMahon said of Lee.19
Nonetheless, cabinet decided to play for time and sought greater detail about Lee’s demands while not conceding any obligation.20 On the same day, however, McMahon sent Lee a cable. Australia, McMahon told the Singaporean leader, would contest any suggestion of payment of rent. Furthermore, there could surely not be any understandings made at the London conference when the financial consequences were so unknown. There was a warning note throughout the cable: mention of how soon the conference was to be, of the late stage that this proposal was coming up — and the prospect that an agreement at the talks might be prevented ‘by differences of this kind.’21 Lee’s reply five days later was silky. It was ‘unlikely’ that the matters could be settled before the conference, Lee agreed, but the position shared by Australia and New Zealand was different from that of the British, which had built the facilities it sought to use and ‘have always been and are here’. Despite entreaties for Australia and New Zealand to stay in Terendak, Malaysia, both had decided to move to Singapore, and had conceded that rents would be negotiated. What, then, was the reason for refusing to pay?22

  McMahon cabled Gorton, now in London with Bury, to suggest that he might talk with Lee himself about the matter. Gorton cabled him back immediately to point out that there might be some confusion if McMahon were conducting a negotiation while his ministers did the same half a world away. ‘You will of course be the best judge,’ Gorton said, which prompted McMahon to complain about confusion and clarity. ‘Regret if there should have been any grounds for confusion at your end,’ he scrawled on his copy.

  Meanwhile, Gorton managed to close off the differences that Lee had suggested existed between Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, and was pressing the issue of rents with the Singaporean minister for defence. Nonetheless, he was clearly worried about McMahon.23 Gorton appended another warning to McMahon in a cable sent the next day. ‘In view of the fluidity of the present situation, I strongly urge that no discussions of any kind be held either in Singapore, or between Canberra and Singapore until conclusion of London talks.’24

  McMahon, aware of Gorton’s anger, had several drafts — variously grovelling, pedantic, nitpicking, and indignant — prepared to rebuke his deputy. ‘It would be a pity if the sense of my cable has been misunderstood,’ ran one suggested line. The same tone ran through all of his subsequent communications with Gorton in London. When McMahon suggested that Gorton express confidence in the overall arrangements and say that any problems could be worked out, Gorton replied that this was unnecessary, unless McMahon wished to give away all of Australia’s negotiating power on the rents and ‘sign a blank cheque’. He urged that Australia be straightforward about the lack of resolution on the issue.25 McMahon’s response was petulant and seemingly intent on reminding Gorton that he was not prime minister anymore:

  I cannot let your 7232 [cable] go without comment. First, I have to say I find its tone surprising. In fact, I had the same reaction to your earlier cable but I decided to let that aspect of it pass. But getting back to 7232, it seems to leave out of account that I was responding to your cables. In the first place, you asked for response and, in the second, there are in any case always final responsibilities residing here in Canberra.26

  There is little doubt that the matter would have been best left to Gorton: he was the minister on the ground. But McMahon’s distrust of Gorton, as well as his understandable concern that the Five Power Defence Arrangements might be ‘falling through over marginal issues’, spurred him to intervene.27 The successful conclusion of the arrangements did not make matters better for McMahon: he continued to regard his deputy with suspicion and dislike. His fear that his own power might be traduced or impinged was always palpable.

  Attempts by Howson and Jess to upset Gorton’s preselection for his seat of Higgins thickened the tension; equally to blame was what was later called ‘de-Gortonisation’, in which McMahon undid measures and initiatives that Gorton regarded as close to his heart. In June, McMahon deferred a decision on whether to cancel the proposed nuclear-power reactor at Jervis Bay;28 later, he would cancel it entirely, saying that he was ‘never convinced that the amount of money spent on it, and the work done, [was] sufficiently justified’. In his view, the project was ‘moving too quickly and in the wrong way’ with substantial problems of cost and viability still to be considered.29 At other times the tension between McMahon and Gorton arose from understandable differences of opinion over matters of policy, such as when Gorton spoke to the Imperial Services Club on 18 June on the ideas of ‘forward defence’ and ‘fortress Australia’. Gorton knew well that the matter was politically sensitive, given his own problems with defence matters while prime minister and McMahon’s sensitivity to controversy. Nonetheless, in his speech, Gorton appeared to question the orthodoxy of forward defence when he emphasised the costs associated with maintaining Australian military forces in the Asia-Pacific region. Being clear about those costs and Australia’s capacity to meet them lay at the heart of his concerns, as he made plain: ‘The inexcusable action would be to pretend to the people of Australia that full and adequate defence was being provided when it was not.’30

  For McMahon, this step off the orthodox line was simply too much. When he read of the speech, he told his staff that Gorton was ‘a nasty bit of work’ and had breached cabinet confidentiality by speaking about a matter that had been discussed in cabinet only days before.31 He had a point: Gorton’s advocacy in that meeting was much in the vein of his speech, and he had gained little support from his colleagues for it.32 Yet McMahon refrained from confronting Gorton directly. Alan Reid was blunt about it: ‘McM[ahon] as usual when Gorton is involved over-reacts. He gives the impression that he is frightened of the man.’33 McMahon called Howson and told him the speech could provide the catalyst to get rid of Gorton altogether. He wanted to know what opinion was on the backbench.34 By the next day, Howson could report back that McMahon should use Gorton’s speech to mobilise opinion in his favour, both within the party and the press, in order to prepare the ground for ‘the next incident’ that would inevitably occur within weeks.35 It was not enough to reassure McMahon. The next day, his worry and dithering was palpable to Alan Reid:

  Gorton is rattling McM[ahon]. His nerves seem to be reaching breaking point. He is asking what he should do with Gorton. One suggestion was that he should be shoved upstairs, appointed to London in succession to Downer, whose term is up. McM[ahon] says that Gorton wants to go to London but he is suspicious of him. London is not as important as it was. But Gorton could still do considerable harm. But later when he offers the job to Gorton [he] knocks it back. As McM[ahon]’s stocks decline, G[orton] can probably see his rising. He undoubtedly nurses the thought that he can make a comeback, either before or after the next elections.36

  A few days later, Reid was sick of it. When McMahon telephoned again to complain about Gorton, the journalist was extraordinarily blunt: ‘For God’s sake behave like a prime minister. If you want to take him on, take him on, but don’t keep complaining about him behind his back. All that does is give the impression that you’re dead scared of him.’37

  A confrontation between the two would come in a matter of weeks. But what would throw McMahon into immediate despair was the crumbling of an old certainty: the palatability of communist China.

  DAYS before taking over from Gorton, McMahon had authored a cabinet submission recommending that the restrictions on Australian trade with the PRC be removed, so that there would be ‘as few restraints as possible’ on the trading relationship.38 In May, the McMahon cabinet agreed to relax controls of strategic exports — ‘My point is to screw everything out of [the] Chinese we can,’ McMahon said during the cabinet meeting39 — but in the intervening period there were clear signs that the parameters of Australia’s relationship with China were beginning to change.40 On 2 April, Jim Plimsoll sent word that the American National Security Council — comprising, among others, Nixon, his vice-president, the secretaries of state and treasury,
and the attorney-general — had considered the PRC’s representation in the UN.41 It had not come to any decision, but the mere fact of the meeting made clear that the US would not consult Australia about a change in policy: it would inform Australia of a change in its China policy. When McMahon read of this meeting, he immediately sought to ensure that the White House heard Australia’s views.42 He was unaware that Nixon was not going to be listening: early in March, the president had directed that matters to do with Australia be handled by others. Only matters that required a ‘presidential decision and can only be handled at a presidential level’ would be presented to him.43

  Advising McMahon on foreign relations, Richard Woolcott recalled advising McMahon that Australia should recognise China. The prime minister would not countenance it. ‘McMahon said that he couldn’t do it because his party wouldn’t accept it,’ Woolcott recalled.44 Keith Waller thought similarly. ‘I think the attitude of the DLP was a major factor … The McMahon government in particular was very timorous so far as the DLP were concerned. McMahon was in constant touch with B.A. Santamaria, and tended to check his moves before he made them.’45 McMahon was caught in a bind. Labor was pressing the government over China’s suspension of wheat sales, a sore point that led Doug Anthony to declare his bitter opposition to any rapprochement with the PRC. ‘I wouldn’t recognise Red China just to sell wheat,’ he said, ‘[and] I wouldn’t sell my foreign policies or my philosophies just to try to do a trade deal.’46 Labor was also reaping the rewards of Whitlam’s longstanding advocacy for the diplomatic recognition of the PRC — an advocacy that went back over sixteen years, to 1954: